from colonial times to contemporary practices
Domestic work in India has a long history, and accounts of domes-tic workers extend from the Vedic era, around 1000 BC to the 19th century colonial period. (see Thapar 2002). Up to and during the colonial period domestic workers, many of them slaves, were divided into those who worked outside in the fields and those who worked indoors. A hierarchy existed between those who worked as their masters’ personal attendants and could therefore enter the inner quarters of the house, and those who worked in the courtyard and garden. (Fuchs 1980, 155). Field slaves were typically from untouch-able castes, which were prohibited from entering upper caste homes.
Most in-house servants were from the low status shudra caste and its sub-castes, although some were from the same high castes as their employers (Thapar 2002, 186, 303; Fuchs 1980, 155). The history of domestic work partly overlaps with that of slavery, since domestic slavery existed officially in practically all parts of India until the 19th century, and domestic work was the most common employment of the slaves (Fuchs 1980, 155; Neetha 2003, 122; Thapar 2002, xiii, 303). Although slavery was abolished by law in 1843 slavery in the form of bonded labour continues to exist, in some cases within do-mestic work (Human Rights Watch 1996, 27).3
In colonial times, domestic service was influenced by other trans-formations within society. The dichotomy between the outer (bahir)
3 Bonded labour was also outlawed in 1976 through the enactment of The Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976 (Human Rights Watch 1996, 27).
and the inner (ghar) was emphasised in the colonial period (Chat-terjee 1993, 119–122). While it was necessary to adapt and imitate Western norms in the outer domain, it became important to main-tain the inner domain, the home, as the main domain of conserving Indian identity. The outer world was perceived as the domain of the male, and the inner world, the home, as the domain of the female, and resisting colonial influences at home became mainly a women’s task. (ibid). The idea of the home as a ‘private space’ became increas-ingly common towards the end of the 19th century, and privacy of the home became part of the middle class identity. The new middle class established the new criteria of social respectability, and while the English/European home often provided an ideal model, its struc-ture and modus operandi were modified according to Indian reform-ist principles (Banerjee 1996, 7).
As in other colonised countries, the native middle class was placed in a position of subordination to its colonial masters, but in a po-sition of dominance over others (Chatterjee, 1993, 36).4 Although the home became the stage for anti-colonial opposition, it would be simplistic to see the home as a domain where Western values were totally rejected. On the contrary, the nationalist paradigm applied a principle of selection,5which meant not so much a dismissal of mo-dernity but rather an attempt to make momo-dernity consistent with the nationalist project (Chatterjee 1993, 120–121, 126). Balancing these two was, however, complicated, as noted by Banerjee (1996, 8) in her analysis of 19th century domestic manuals in Bengal:
While the steady stream of references to domestics and the prescription of maternalistic behaviour towards them imply the acceptability of hiring domestic help in colonial Bengal,
4 Studies on the colonial middle class talk about “Hindu” culture. The ability and willingness of “Hindu” culture to extend its hegemonic boundaries to include what was distinctly Islamic became a matter of much contention in 19th and 20th century Bengal (Chatterjee, 1993, 74).
5 Italics from the original text (Chatterjee 1993, 121).
the employment of servants in new middle class homes was viewed with suspicion by the same authors, describing having servants as a negative development brought about by modern Western education.
The standards created for middle class women and the nationalist project emphasised the cultural superiority of the “modern” Indian woman over the Westernised woman, the British memsabih6 and the
“common” woman, considered as coarse, vulgar, loud, quarrelsome, de-void of superior moral sense, sexually promiscuous, and subjected to brutal physical oppression by the male (Chatterjee 1993, 126–130).
The numbers of lower-class women as household servants steadily increased as employment of servants emerged as a status symbol of the new middle class or bhadralok7 (Banerjee, 1996, 8). The British families in India were also able to employ a large number of workers given the very low wages, a custom that many Indians working in the Government adopted (Fuchs 1980, 157–158).
Different perceptions of the colonial influence on domestic labour relationships in India and elsewhere prevail. Romero (2002, 78) ar-gued that paternalistic behaviour towards servants was transmitted and later institutionalised in the New World and in Third World countries under colonialism, an argument which I find too simplis-tic. In India, Fernandes (2006, 13) argued that while there had been servants long before the colonial period, the idea of servants as part of the symbolic capital of middle class homes became central in colo-nial times, influenced by British perceptions of middle class homes.
By contrast, Mehta (1960, quoted in Rollins 1985) perceived today’s paid domestic work not so much as an outcome of colonial times,
6 The term was originally used as a respectful term for a European married woman in the Bengal Presidency, the first portion denoting ”ma’am”. Over the years it became used more widely throughout the British colonies in South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa (Chaudhuri 1988, 517).
7 In Bengali language, bhadralok means literally a respectable man or a gentle-man, but generally refers to the upper castes, as opposed to the poor, uneducated chhotolok or gariblok (Ray 2000, 695).
but rather as an attenuated survival of patterns prevailing from pre-colonial times. To conclude, while the pre-colonial period and British influence certainly impacted Indian middle class domesticities and domestic labour relations, it would be naive to see the practices of today solely as a colonial heritage. Given the long and wide spread existence of domestic service in the South Asian sub-continent, it is not fruitful to see pre-colonial and colonial times as separable phases, but rather as a continuum of transforming practices in domestic la-bour relations.
In India today, domestic labour relations are in a process of com-modification. The workers increasingly sell their labour power to employers through part-time arrangements. For the employer, it is common to allocate work to different workers who specialise in cer-tain tasks, such as cleaning, cooking, or gardening. In spite of these transformations, domestic workers’ roles are in some ways similar to those of servants in the late colonial period. In India, the traditional arrangement where the worker, “24-hours worker”, renders her or his time literally into the hands of the employer continues to co-exist alongside the more recent arrangements. At the same time, labour relations are in a process of change and, quite naturally, both sides try to make the best out of the situation.
Paid domestic work as an occupation has historically been dis-regarded and devalued (Anderson 2000; Romero 2002). Romero (2002, 42) argued that there is nothing intrinsically demeaning about domestic labour, but that the pervasive structural relations of race, class and gender embedded in the labour relationship give it low status. By the paradox of domestic service she means that domes-tic work is actually a better option than many other low-status jobs available to many of the workers, but it is devalued by them because of the heavy stigma linked to it. In India, it has been considered a particularly stigmatised occupation (Ray and Qayum 2009, 2).
However, paid domestic work in India is characterised by hierar-chies, not only between employers and workers, but also among
work-ers themselves. While class can be perceived as the major divide be-tween employers and workers, it is caste, gender, ethnicity, religion, and age, and their intersections, that shape the hierarchies among work-ers in Jaipur, skillfully and selectively orchestrated by the employwork-ers.
Domestic workers can roughly be divided into two main groups:
1) workers who work and live at the employers’ house (live-ins), and 2) part-time workers who live in their own homes. I have explored domestic labour relations in general, but my specific focus is on two groups of workers. The first are the maids whose tasks include clean-ing floors and washclean-ing dishes, usually in several houses every day.
They live in their own homes. The second group consists of live-in workers who perform all kinds of tasks, and live with the employer with varying degree of liberty or isolation.
Throughout the research process, the employers time and again spoke about their fears and mistrust of workers and their dependency on the workers. Although their fears seemed somewhat exaggerated,
‘servant crimes’ are regularly portrayed in the media. However, com-pared to the scale of paid domestic work it is quite surprising how rare serious breaches of trust are. If the employers fear workers, even if only as a potential threat, the workers have very real fears related to job insecurity, which at least partially explains their subservience to their employers. Many of them, including the maids in my data in Jaipur, are highly dependent on their employers, even if the risk of job loss is now spread by working for several employers.
regulation of domestic work
Domestic work has traditionally been a grey area in Indian labour legislation. A ‘Domestic Workers (Condition of Services) Bill’ was introduced as early as 1959, but it has yet to become law (Gothoskar 2005, 1). For years, civil society organisations, most notably the Na-tional Domestic Workers Movement, have called for naNa-tional legisla-tion to regulate domestic workers’ rights, as well as for the inclusion of domestic workers under the Minimum Wages Act (1948) and the
Unorganized Workers’ Social Security Bill (2008). Although nation-al legislation does not exist, state-level regulation has been enacted, at least in Karnataka, Kerala, Maharasthra and Tamil Nadu, manifest-ing the nature of the multi level and complex federal political system (Brass 1997, 303–304).8
When I discussed the question of regulation of domestic work with Rajasthan government officials during my last field work period in 2007, there were no signs of regulating the sector. At the same time, civil society organizations in Jaipur had begun to lobby for such regulation. Following similar developments in other states, in March 2010 the Chief Minister of the state of Rajasthan proposed the in-troduction of legislation for the safety of domestic workers there.9 The proposed legislation would be entitled ‘Domestic Workers‘ Se-curity Act’, and according to the minister the move would provide social security for domestic workers.
The employment of children in domestic work was not legally prohibited when I begun this research process, but in 2006 the Gov-ernment of India imposed an amendment to the existing Child La-bour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act (1984).10 The amendment prohibits the employment of children under fourteen as domestic servants or in roadside cafeterias (dhabas), teashops, hotels, and
oth-8 The Maharasthra state adopted a Domestic Workers’ Welfare Board Bill in 2009. In addition, state level regulation has led to the inclusion of domestic work-ers in the Unorganised Sector Bill (2008) in Andra Pradesh and Bihar; in the Minimum Wages Act in Karnataka (2004), and in Andra Pradesh (2007); and in Tamil Nadu the Government has established a Tamil Nadu Domestic Work-ers Welfare Board in 2007 under section 6 of the Tamil Nadu Manual work-ers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Work) Act 1982. (Kundu 2008,18; http://www.ndwm.org/resource-centre/default.asp).
9 Preliminary notification for Minimum Wage Act for Domestic Workers was passed by the Rajasthan Government on 4th July 2007.
10 Child labour legislation has a longer history than this: the issue of the mini-mum age was raised in the Legislative Assembly of British India in 1921 (Burra, 1995, 12). Several policy initiatives, national plans and programmes directly or indirectly related to child work, such as the National Policy for Children (1974), National Policy on Education (1986), and National Policy for Child Labour (1987) also exist (Bajbai 2003, 7–10).
er hospitality sectors (Save the Children 2007, 2).11 For child rights organisations the enactment of the 2006 amendment was a major achievement, although they remain sceptical about the implementa-tion of the ban. They expressed legitimate concerns over the lack of implementation of the amendment, given the Governments’ marginal efforts in putting it into practice.12
On an international level, the annual conference of International Labour Organisation adopted in June 2011 the ‘Convention on Do-mestic Workers’, an international treaty that binds the member states that ratify it.13 The new convention is likely to increase the pressure for the Indian government to enact national legislation on domestic workers’ rights.
Since the overwhelming majority of workers in India are in the informal sector, it is not surprising that most domestic workers are not unionised or otherwise organised. The needs of informal sector workers, women workers in particular, have been overlooked by the conservative practices of labour organisations and trade unions (Ba-ruah 2004, 605).14 However, several domestic workers’ organisations have been established in past decades.15 The most notable among them, the Mumbai-based National Domestic Workers Movement
11 Anyone found violating the ban must be penalised with a punishment ranging from a jail term of three months to two years and/or a fine of 10,000 to 20,000 rupees (Save the Children 2007).
12 Within the first year of the existence of the Amendment, the Government of India announced that there had been 2,229 cases of violations of the law; 38,818 inspections had been carried out, and 211 prosecutions had been filed (Save the Children 2007, 1).
13 http://www.ilo.org/ilc/ILCSessions/100thSession/media-centre/press-releases/WCMS_157891/lang--en/index.htm Accessed 5.9.2011.
14 There are several organisations of women in the informal sector or ‘self-em-ployed’ women in India and in South Asia more broadly, which have fought hard to gain recognition, and to organise workers. Among the most well-known are the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and the Working Women’s Forum.
(Baruah 2004, 605–606).
15 Several other local, state-level and national organisations, for example, other NGOs and church-related organisations and some women’s organisations have also lobbied for domestic workers’ rights (Gothoskar 2005, 1).
(NDWM) is today active in most Indian states and has about two million members.16 Even if action for domestic workers’ rights is lim-ited considering the massive size of the labour force, these efforts seem to be shaking established thought about paid domestic work and its practices.
In her study on household workers of Mexican origin in the US, Romero (2002, 45) argued that the workers are struggling to control the work process and transfrom the employee-employer relationship into a more client-tradesperson relationship, in which labour services rather than labour power are sold. In India, there are signs of similar struggles, even if they are not so open and barely emerging in some states. The workers increasingly try to push labour negotiations to-wards basic questions of working conditions, such as wages and time off. Employers respond to such calls in varying ways, some wishing to maintain traditional personalised relations, others to introduce more regulated practices.
gender inequalities in india and rajasthan
The Constitution of India (1950) prohibits discrimination based on sex as a fundamental right17, but there remains a yawning gap be-tween de jure and de facto rights (Agarwal 2000, 37). The extensive literature on the position of girls and women in India shows that gender based discrimination against them is a central feature of In-dian society, as well as of South Asia generally.18 Major questions are, among others, the discrimination against daughters and widows in inheritance; a persistent gender disparity in literacy levels19; violence
16 http://www.ndwm.org/ Accessed 14.9.2010.
17 http://lawmin.nic.in/coi/coiason29july08.pdf Accessed 7.4.2010
18 UNDP’s (2009) Gender Development Index ranking at 114 was slightly better than its Human Development Index at 134 (http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/
HDR_2009_EN_Table_J.pdf ). However, on a civil society initiated Gender Equity Index, based on empowerment, economic activity and education, India ranked among the ten least gender equal countries. (http://www.socialwatch.org/node/11556).
19 In 2001, the female literacy rate was 54 % compared to male literacy rate of 76 % (Raju 2006, 82).
against women and girls; and at higher than local levels20, a very low percentage of women in public decision-making both in the lower and upper seats of Parliament and in managerial positions in admin-istration (Agarwal 2000, 37; Bhan 2001, 14–15). However, there are significant improvements in, for example, education and health. Both absolute female literacy and women’s health care indicators have im-proved considerably (Bhan 2001, 11). In education, the gender dis-parity is narrowing, with the enrollment and participation of girls and women increasing in first, second and higher levels of education (Raju 2006, 83–84).21 The overall fertility rates (the average number of children per woman) in India has fallen considerably in recent dec-ades from 3.6 children per woman in 1991 to 2.8 in 2006 (UNFPA 2009; Véron 2006, 3).22 In Rajasthan, the fertility rate in 2001 was 3.9 children per woman (UNFPA 2009).
In terms of gender inequality, questions that are particularly per-tinent for this study relate to the endemic discrimination against girls and its implications for female workers’ lives, female participation in the labour market, and the gendered division of labour at home.
Notwithstanding considerable class, urban-rural and regional dif-ferences (between the relatively more gender equal South India and the more conservative Northern India) in most questions related to women’s status, preference for sons is prevalent throughout society (Pande & Malhotra 2007, 2). It stems, among other factors, from the dominant idea that sons, as future heirs, support parents in their old age, whereas daughters will belong to the future husbands’ fam-ily (Kakar 1982, 90). It is widely acknowledged that discrimination
20 In 1993, 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments reserved 33 % of seats for women in the panchayats, the local governance bodies (Kaushik 2007, 22).
21 There is no agreement on whether the increased literacy rates and education for girls and women automatically lead to an improved status for women (see, for example, Nussbaum 1995).
22 The Government of India introduced the concept of ‘population problem’
already in its first five-year plan in 1951, in which rapid population growth was considered an impediment to the country’s development (Véron 2003, 1).
against girls is manifested in the sex-selective abortions of female fe- tuses, which is on the rise despite national legislation23.24 Between the Censuses of 1991 and 2001 the sex ratio of girls to boys declined from 945 per 1000 to 927 per 1000 boys Census. In the 2001 Cen-sus, some of the regions with the worst figures are amongst the most prosperous in India (Office of the Registrar 2003, 1).25 Abortions, of-ten following a sex-determination test, can be perceived as a strategy to ensure a desired family sex composition and as part of a conscious family building strategy (Sabarwal 2003, 94).26
The under-registration of girls in Censuses and other population surveys may explain some of the sex-ratio biases (Sabarwal 2003, 89), but more importantly, child mortality is higher amongst females than males. It stems from female infanticide and outright neglect, and es-pecially from health and nutritional discrimination against girls dur-ing early childhood.27 Whether or not parents discriminate against a living daughter also depends on the sex of her older siblings. (Pande
& Malhotra 2007, 3; Sabrawal 2003, 97). In particular, if parents already have sons, they seem more likely to nurture a daughter than if the daughter is at the end of a line of daughters. Girls with two
& Malhotra 2007, 3; Sabrawal 2003, 97). In particular, if parents already have sons, they seem more likely to nurture a daughter than if the daughter is at the end of a line of daughters. Girls with two